One of the greatest joys of being a reviewer is encountering an unfamiliar compositional voice. Adrienne Elisha (1958-2017) was a violinist, viola player and composer, and was born in Glen Cove, New York. She studied these three disciplines in Indiana, Cleveland and Buffalo. Her music was admired by figures as diverse as Leonard Bernstein, Mario Davidovsky and Peter Eötvös. As a performer – she can be heard on this disc in archival recordings from 2004 05 of her unaccompanied viola piece Inner Voices (1998), in which we also hear her sing briefly, and the gripping trio with cello and double bass Harrier (1997) – she played with many contemporary music ensembles, including the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. She died of cancer at the height of her powers.

Those powers were not inconsiderable even earlier on, as the pieces from the 1990s make abundantly clear. Harrier, in particular, is an impressive trio for alto and bass strings inspired by harrier hawks in her native New England. Anthelion (2009) – a sextet for winds, strings, piano and percussion – also draws inspiration from the natural world, this time the rare optical halo also known as an antisun. Its two movements, ‘Sonic’ and ‘Resonance’, purposefully translate the optical phenomena as sonic elements not unlike the way Saariaho depicted the aurora in Lichtbogen; however, there any similarities end.

The most captivating work in the programme is also – and by some way – the longest, Feneketlento (2004), inspired by a bottomless lake in Hungary. Composed for her cellist brother Steven, who performs it with gripping musicality here, Feneketlento (translated by Elisha as ‘eternal lake’) is part tone poem, part virtuoso study, part ‘musical letter’ to her brother. It is the most personal work here, in which Elisha the creative artist is most clearly heard. The picture of the composer is rounded out by two late chamber orchestral works, Azure (2014) and the enchanting TranscenDance (2016), played with compelling intensity by the Chamber Orchestra of Boston conducted by David Feltner. Navona’s sound is clear and in general very good, given that the six works were recorded in at least four distinct locations on five separate occasions between 2004 and 2016.